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<title>i've been longing for this thing called romance by GStK</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25083340">i've been longing for this thing called romance</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GStK/pseuds/GStK'>GStK</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>measured and perfect motion [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Space Opera, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:09:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,800</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25083340</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GStK/pseuds/GStK</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>celestial body on celestial body parade, alright?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Belial/Lucilius (Granblue Fantasy), Belial/Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy), Lucifer/Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>measured and perfect motion [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1870258</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>i've been longing for this thing called romance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Cil always used to prefer it this way.”</p><p>“Hmph.”</p><p>“You prefer it too, don’t you, Sandy? You still got that virginity of yours?”</p><p>“YOU--”</p><p>Belial sees Sandalphon reach to cut off the connection and laughs. His laughter stills the other man’s hand, though it hovers just outside the range of the camera, threatening.</p><p>It’s nostalgic in the worst way. He tastes ash on his tongue. Way back when, way back when, the time lag between his connection and Cil’s could range anywhere from three minutes to an hour, depending on their light-distance from one another. Nowadays, FTL broadcast and fuzzy computations send and receive messages in an instant. The power of technology!</p><p>Cil really would have loved it.</p><p>Sandy appears settled down, for the most part. He’s studying Belial with an intense consternation, clearly trying to puzzle out if the silence is due to a disruption in the feed or time lag. Belial offers him a wave. Sandalphon rears back, though he has nowhere to go in that little ship of his.</p><p>Belial stalks around the wide expanse of his personal quarters: 300 metres devoted to him and him alone. Canaan is over a hundred kilometres long, big enough to collect its own little satellites as they encroach on the orbit of 51 Pegasi, or Helvetios. (Belial prefers to call it 51 Pegs.) “Do you miss it?” he asks into the silence. He rakes a hand across his collection of rooms, though he refers to the whole of the ship. “You’re looking kind of lonely out there.”</p><p>“Shut up.”</p><p>“How’s the <em>Lucifer </em> treating you?” Belial replies sweetly.</p><p>Sandy is quiet for a hot moment. When he replies, his grip is strong on the steer. “He--” he falters. “She’s fine,” he finishes, correcting himself with the proper pronoun for a ship.</p><p>Belial grins. “What was that?”</p><p>“She’s <b>fine</b>.”</p><p>“You weren’t thinking about the real Lucifer, were you?”</p><p>Sandalphon’s eyes shoot away. Belial can see the faint glow of stars outside his window. If he turns his gaze to his own flank, he can see the same constellations, executed from a different angle. Sandy’s quite brave.</p><p>“The ship is the ship. The name doesn’t mean anything,” Sandy is saying. Belial gives him a hearty nod.</p><p>“It definitely doesn’t mean anything that this is the only time you’ll get to be inside of <em>Lucifer,</em> right?” He tosses his head back and chuckles when Sandy goes red and the transmission crackles. “What’s your status, honey?”</p><p>“I can see Bellerophon,” Sandalphon says, raising his hackles but refusing to jump again. “It’s grey. The whole thing is grey. What are we supposed to do with this?”</p><p>“It’s called Dimidium,” he corrects, “Or 51 Pegs Baby--”</p><p>“51 Peg-b?” Sandy inquires with doubt in his voice. “Look. The name doesn’t matter. We can’t inhabit this thing.”</p><p>Belial frowns towards the holoscreen. “You knew that before you went under. Got some dream freeze stuck between your ears, Sandy?”</p><p>With a grit of his teeth, Sandalphon throws his head to the side, pretending to study the scanners trained on their new home. Belial casts him a sigh, worrying the gold ring on his finger.</p><p>“We’re going to pop Dimidium’s cherry and fill her up with life. The Canaan is going to be in orbit around her--”</p><p>“I know that,” Sandalphon growls. “I <em>know </em>that.”</p><p>Then he must surely know that introducing terrarian bacteria and Lucilius’ formulas will get the world developing a trillion times faster than back on their home planet. Billions of years will be reduced to three. The hardest part was getting here -- more than two hundred years in deep-freeze hypersleep.</p><p>“Sensitive, Sandy?” Belial presses two fingers to his lips and blows him a kiss. “Wish I could be there to help you out with that tension.”</p><p>None of them were supposed to be awake for another four years. There’s a host of cherubs sleeping across the whole of Canaan, muscles kept from atrophy by rousing machinery, catheters and IVs giving their slow-beating hearts the means to survive.</p><p>The only reason they’re alive now is because of Cil.</p><p>The only reason they’re going to have a planet to inhabit is Cil.</p><p>The only one who couldn’t be bothered to stay asleep for ten more stupid years? Cil.</p><p>“Talking to you makes me want to launch myself into the sun,” Sandy fires back.</p><p>“Who else would you talk to? It’s just you and me out here, Sandy.”</p><p>Belial stretches his muscles in the silence to follow. He takes a lap of the room, past the double bed, past the picture taken two hundred and ten years ago, that single holo Cil let him take of their wedding.</p><p>He’s wheeling around the oxygen-spouting plants placed artfully in the corners of the room. When he returns to the sight of the camera and into Sandalphon’s field of vision, the little pilot is wearing a difficult expression again.</p><p>Sandalphon looks sharply at him from the corners of his eyes. “Who else is awake?”</p><p>Belial flings his hand roughly left and right. “I just told you. You and me, Sandy. The ship’s AI, if you want to count him as ‘awake.’” At that thought, Sandy mutters something dark that comes across as a blur of noise on the line.</p><p>“We have visuals on the planet,” Sandalphon argues, “and I’ve just confirmed everything with my sensors. I’m on my way back. We’ll be there in three years. This is--”</p><p>“Maybe,” Belial interrupts, fascinated still that he can do so. (Cil, why were you so good at everything?) “I just want to get to know you better, Sandy.”</p><p>“I’ve had my fill of you.”</p><p>“And I haven’t even taken my first bite!” Belial smirks. “Don’t be so frigid. Play nice and get back here.”</p><p>“I think I’ll stay,” says Sandalphon, hard as ice. “I have enough oxygen for the next four months. Water and calories, too.”</p><p>“Are you scared to come back to Lucifer’s grave?”</p><p>To this, Sandalphon says nothing.</p><p>Belial taps on the glass, which distorts the screen for a second, but nothing more. “Be happy! You have a body to come back to. Some of us don’t have our spouse’s remains at all.”</p><p>Sandy scrunches up his face. “Lucilius <em>killed</em> him, Belial.” He glances once in Belial’s direction, aghast and tired and sad -- because he wants to blame, and he knows he’s wrong.</p><p>Belial shrugs and sprawls across the room’s white sofa. “Cil set his stasis to rouse him seven years ago and tried to get Lucifer to wake up with him. It’s nobody’s fault that Cifer passed on. Two hundred years of hypersleep does things to people.”</p><p>There’s always going to be glitches in the code or metabolic disagreements. Maybe the machines didn’t rouse Lucifer enough. Maybe the IV stopped dripping. The main point is that Sandalphon has someone to <em>come back to</em>, even if it’s a corpse frozen inside a sleeping chamber, gaunt and blood frozen.</p><p>Sandalphon understands this. He’s an emotional little thing, but he’s not stupid. He looks like he wants to scream or bite his own tongue off. All he manages is a heavy sigh, tapping something into the computer on his side of the screen.</p><p>Belial reaches out and touches the glass, again. Sandalphon looks at him.</p><p>“Lucilius,” says Sandalphon with great difficulty, “is probably still alive.”</p><p>Belial drops his hand. “Not in any meaningful way to us. He dove head-first into the swarm of black holes at the centre of the galaxy. Time dilation means he won’t come back for thousands of years.”</p><p>From the grief of losing Lucifer to ice? So he could be alive to see them flourishing on a new planet, or return just in time to save it in its death throes? Or maybe he just wanted to see beyond the event horizon and touch God’s lightless mirror with his own hands.</p><p>“You’re going to go after him,” Sandalphon murmurs. It is not a question. Belial shrugs.</p><p>“After everyone’s sitting pretty on 51 Pegs-b, sure. I <em>am</em> the acting captain. Cil woke me up for a reason.”</p><p>“And then you woke me up because you couldn’t stand jerking off alone,” Sandy says, sour.</p><p>“Ooh! You’ve got a mouth on you! That’s new.”</p><p>A silence. Belial runs his usual check on the rest of the ship. Canaan is creaky, but silent. The live biomes are fragments of the skydoms brought along with them. They thrive without human interference.</p><p>“You’re going to go after him,” Sandalphon repeats. “Why should I… why should we…”</p><p>Belial looks up from his console, and he is suddenly, strangely fond. “Because you won’t let go of the love of your life, either. You’re hoping he can be reanimated on the new planet. You’ll wait a hundred years for him, if you have to.”</p><p>Sandalphon gives him a long look. “And what of it?”</p><p>Belial smiles. “Who says we can’t have our own little thing ‘til the husbands get back?”</p><p>The other man seems to physically wilt at the suggestion. He’s the only pilot who could have possibly replaced Lucifer and done the close sweeps of their new home. They’ve got plenty of skilled people in their frozen aisle, but the position of chief pilot belongs to Lucifer -- and now, his vice, Sandalphon. It could only be him.</p><p>And who else could it be, if not Cil, to stir something upon the Mars in Belial’s chest?</p><p>They’re each other’s only chance of happiness in this vast expanse of black and burning radiation.</p><p>“... I’m on my way back. Don’t contact me until I request permission to dock,” Sandalphon says, which is the closest to assent he’ll give. His feed disappears from the holo screen and Belial sees the stars beyond.</p><p>He studies the new system for a while, and then he’s back on his feet, restoring the gold chains to the gold stripes on the shoulder of his uniform.</p><p>“Ship!” he calls. “Got a little question for you.”</p><p>“What,” replies the dull, synthesised voice. It could pass for the real thing. Almost.</p><p>“Need you down here to see it,” Belial says with a waggle of his finger.</p><p>There’s a distinct <em>click</em> as the intercom cuts off, and then the ship’s avatar is appearing before him.</p><p>He’s the very picture of Lucilius, cortex information captured from the height of his youth. His white robes spill over him in waves. Though he lacks some of the real Cil’s wrinkles, the frustration lines as they creeped into their thirties, he’s close enough. He could pass for the real thing, almost.</p><p>Belial smiles and sweeps the ship into his arms, electrical sinews and dissatisfaction wrapped up in a bow. He could kiss him, but he doesn’t.</p><p>Kisses are for Sandy, on his way home.</p><p>“Have you ever heard the story of Bellerophon and the Chimera?”</p>
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